


Armor

by orphan_account



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Bad Ending, For Science!, Gen, Genderqueer Character, Spoilers, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-03
Updated: 2013-11-03
Packaged: 2017-12-31 09:29:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1030074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hanji knows what ze has to do, but faced with a hurt, frightened boy ze doesn't think ze wants to.</p><p>[Contains abstract descriptions of vivisection and holy hell spoilers for chapter 50.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Armor

The Armored Titan was a boy.

He was broad, powerfully built, with short-cropped yellow hair and an angular face that, with some imagination, resembled the plated skull of the Titan, but he was still plainly a boy — maybe eighteen, maybe younger. He huddled in a corner of the dim cell, glaring through eyes shadowed with pain and sleeplessness, hunched under shoulders that weren’t quite done filling out. He’d be big, when they were done, maybe bigger than Mike. The thought of Mike in association with what ze was about to do made Hanji feel sick.

The Armored Titan is sturdier, they had told hin. He’ll hold up better for your… purposes. Ze hadn’t minded the distasteful emphasis they gave to the word, because ze had been thinking of an enormous, plated monster, huge and unstoppable as the shifting of tectonic plates or a mountain avalanche given flesh, just another form of the mindless things ze already studied and atypical enough to make hin shudder in anticipation at the thought of examining it. Ze hadn’t been thinking of — this, a boy just barely too old to not be a child, the stubble on his chin and cheeks not yet coarse, trying to hide his fear under a veneer of defiance and not really succeeding. Ze tried to connect him to the hundreds of thousands who’d died in the Fall of Maria, and failed.

Major Hanji Zoe disassembled Titans for fun, but ze did not know if ze could do this.

Erwin had given hin hir orders, and he wasn’t wrong. This was an unprecedented opportunity for learning, and ze was the most qualified to take advantage of it. Somehow, the advancement of knowledge didn’t seem like quite a good enough reason faced with a frightened boy bound by chains far too heavy for his frame.

The Major swallowed and donned hir own armor, tugging hir goggles down over hir eyes and snapping gloves onto hir wrists.

“Get him,” ze said, and hir voice sounded strange in hir ears.

Hir assistants took notes for hin. Normally ze would have done it hinself, to hir own particular preferences, but if hir attention wavered, ze would realize what ze was doing, and then — ze didn’t know what would happen then. With hir focus narrowed to a tunnel-vision that contained only hir hands and hir voice as ze dictated what ze saw, ze could imagine this was one of the frogs and rats ze had practiced on in hir younger days.

It wasn’t very effective. Dead frogs didn’t twitch and scream and beg hin to stop. Rats didn’t cry for their comrades as ze had to cut through the same tissues again and again because they kept repairing with bursts of vapor that threatened to scald hin.

It got hin through the session, anyway.

Ze stripped hir gloves off, washed hir hands, and rinsed the blood from hir goggles. The smell was thick and choking in hir throat, and the familiar slimy feeling the gloves always left on hir skin felt deeper, more repulsive, something ze couldn’t erase no matter how hard ze tried to wash the feeling of leather slick with blood and viscera from hir hands.

Hanji bent over the sink, and was violently sick.


End file.
